XV. Refoulement from Libya and Dumping People in
the Desert near the Border

Although the practice of dumping migrants in the border
region appears not to be uncommon, there have not been clearly documented cases
since 2007 of refugees or asylum seekers being forcibly returned to their
countries of origin or to places from which they would be forcibly returned.[171]
Human Rights Watch had the opportunity to interview two of the refugees, Milli
and Aron, who the Libyan authorities forcibly returned to Eritrea in 2004. They
have since fled from Eritrea again, traveled back to Libya, and this time
succeeded in leaving Libya and going to Malta, where they are now living. Human
Rights Watch reported the facts of the refoulement in our 2006 report, Stemming
the Flow, but, of course, was not able to interview the returnees at that
time, who were imprisoned upon arrival in Eritrea. Eritreans continue to
be refouled from other countries in the region.[172]

The refoulement ordeal began on May 21, 2004 when the boat
that Milli and Aron were on sank off the coast of Libya. Seven of their fellow
passengers drowned. The rest were caught on the coast near the village of Kums.

Milli told Human Rights Watch what happened when they
returned to the Libyan shore (Aron separately told essentially the same story).
It is a story of almost continuous beatings from the time they were apprehended
upon landing until the time their plane took off to deport them to Eritrea two
months later, at which point they were immediately jailed by their home
government:

The police were there and almost everyone was caught and
arrested. The one who caught me threatened me with a knife. We were tired. The
police beat us with their sticks and put us in the boot of the police car. They
put us in a normal house, not a police station, and kept us there one night.

The next day, they took us to Misrata. There were 172
people, all from the same boat, taken there. Misrata was a big prison. There
were also other African prisoners there. I was held there for one month. I was
beaten daily.

I tried to escape by bribing a guard. I paid him $150. I
gave him the money, but other soldiers were waiting outside and caught me. I
had a friend with me. We were both taken to a room. They beat us so much that I
became sick. They used electricity. They then beat me on the inside of my foot.
My foot is still injured and I still have trouble walking. Four or five guards
beat me. I wasn’t able to walk for three weeks. My foot was too wounded.

The first day after I was caught trying to escape was the
worst beating. After that, the beatings were normal beatings for three days in
the small room with my friend, and then they returned us to the big room. The
next day they sent us to Jawazat Prison where there were many nationalities. I
was there almost one month. This prison was not as bad as Misrata. The beating
was normal when they counted people in the morning and at night; that was when
they beat people. I was transferred from there to Al Fellah prison, where I
spent two days. From there we were taken to a plane. The Eritrean ambassador
was there at the airport. It was July 22, 2004. There were 79 men and 30 women
on the plane.

After we landed in Eritrea I was arrested and spent the
next nine months in prison and the next six months after that in a special
military training for prisoners. It was more like another prison, not normal
military training. After the military training, they sent me back to prison
again. I escaped from the prison and went to Sudan on May 1, 2007. I only spent
a couple of days there and came to Libya a second time.[173]

Libya sent off another charter deportation flight with 75
Eritreans in August 2004, but the passengers hijacked the plane en route and
diverted it to Khartoum, where UNHCR recognized 60 as refugees.[174]
After that incident, Libya is not known to have chartered other deportation
flights to Eritrea, although there was an attempt to charter a flight in July
2008 to return 230 Eritreans.[175] UNHCR
was able to intervene with the authorities inside Libya and prevent their
deportation.[176]

There is still a belief expressed by some Eritreans that
Libya still sends Eritreans back to Eritrea. Gabriel, a 28-year-old Eritrean
who spent a month in Libya in 2008, was convinced that if he was caught he
would be sent back to face his persecutors in Eritrea:

If you are caught on the way by the Libyan police, then you
are afraid they will return you to Eritrea. There are so many people arrested
in Libya, so many prisons. If you are returned to Eritrea, it is known what
kind of punishment you will face. You can be arrested for two or three months,
or you can even be killed. I knew some people who were returned but I
don’t know where they are. Even their families don’t know.[177]

In the years 2003 through 2006, Libya deported roughly
200,000 individuals to their home countries.[178] While
the majority of these people were economic migrants who had entered the country
irregularly, some of them were asylum seekers and refugees who faced the risk
of persecution or maltreatment back home.

The Libyan government contends that most of the people it repatriates
go home willingly,[179] but
under the circumstances of detention described in this report, the lack of
alternatives, and the absence of transparent deportation procedures, the line
between voluntary and coerced returns is not at all clear.

Dumping
in the Desert

Libyan authorities in the coastal area put migrants
(particularly from the Horn of Africa) in trucks and send them to Kufra
purportedly to deport them across the land border with Sudan, but often they
are not actually deported, rather simply left in the Libyan desert. Perhaps
this is because Sudanese border guards are not willing to accept them (the
migrants come not only from Sudan, but from Somalia, Eritrea, and elsewhere).
Instead, according to testimony from migrants, they are left in the desert
within Libyan territory. In practice, this means that the migrants have no
choice but to put their lives in the hands, once again, of the smugglers who
brought them from Kufra to Benghazi or Tripoli in the first place.

The truck journeys themselves are extremely dangerous and
degrading. Migrants told Human Rights about being crammed into closed vehicles
with almost no air. They would remain standing for a two-day journey, not
allowed out even to urinate and defecate. Daniel, the 26-year-old Eritrean whom
we also quote telling about his boat being interdicted by the Maltese Coast
Guard and about his experiences in Misrata,[180] told
us what happened after he left Misrata. It starts with the harrowing truck ride
to the detention center at Kufra and follows with the camp manager ordering
that he be thrown into the desert to die:

After three months [of detention at Misrata], the Libyans
brought a truck and said they would take us back to our home countries. I said
I was Sudanese. The truck took us to Kufra. It was overcrowded with 200 people
and there was no air. It was very hot inside the truck. It was made of metal.
If we had to urinate or defecate we had to do it in the truck where we stood.
When the truck stopped, the drivers wouldn’t let us out. We arrived in
Kufra. It was a very bad prison. I had a cross on my neck, which they ripped
off. We had to line up with our faces against a wall. They hit us with a stick.

They didn’t take our names or fingerprints. They just
herded 78 of us into one small room. There were maybe eight rooms like this.
The room had no beds, and just one toilet right in the room itself, and it
didn’t work. There were no windows. We couldn’t breathe. It was
very dirty. There was no soap, no water, no chance to bathe. We slept on the
floor body to body. There was no space. If I lifted my leg, another person
would fill the space. For food, they gave us a handful of rice for seven
people. Just rice and a little water.

If you made noise, the police would hit you with a metal
stick. They would beat you everywhere. Some people had their arms broken and
the guards did not take them to the hospital.

There was no doctor. At one point I felt very sick; I had a
fever. The people started hitting the door to get the attention of the guards
because I was very sick. The guards took me outside. The camp manager came and
said, “Take him and throw him in the desert.”

A policeman took me, but he took pity on me and took me to
the hospital instead. He bought medicine with his own money and they gave me an
injection. He asked permission to let me sleep outside. Finally, when I got
better, the police let me inside.

Every two or three days, the manager of Kufra camp took 25
or 30 persons at night and sold them to Libyan transporters so he could get
money from us. Other people were just thrown in the desert. Sometimes they
would take people in the desert and run over their legs with a car and just
leave them. He sold me with a group of 25 or 30 people to a Libyan man who put
us in a big house in Kufra and told us we needed to have our families send $200
to pay for our release from Kufra and to take us to Benghazi. It was too much,
too much desert and some people lost hope after three, four, or five tries. I
heard that a lot of people killed themselves.[181]

Being “deported” to Kufra often follows the
traumatic experiences of a failed boat attempt, arrest, and detention in
northern jails. Although the authorities transport migrants to Kufra for
the supposed purpose of expelling them overland to Egypt or Sudan, in fact the
Kufra authorities sometimes do not actually take them to the border but rather
leave them in the desert outside Kufra or make deals with smugglers who pick
them up to start the process again. Tomas, a 24-year-old Eritrean, quoted
above, was sent to Kufra after a failed boat attempt and two months in the
Jawazat Prison in Tripoli:

After two months, they put us with another group of
Eritreans—150 people in all. They put us in a big truck packed with
people. There wasn’t room for anyone to sit down...The only air was from
some open holes in the roof of the truck; otherwise it was completely closed.
The truck drove us from Tripoli to Kufra. We started at 6 am and traveled all
day and all the next night. The truck was closed the entire trip. There were
cracks in the floor and people urinated on the floor, but my eyes were in pain
from the smell.

We begged for air. The truck would stop for the drivers to
take a break and eat, but they would not open the door for us. They were afraid
we would run away. The worst was when we arrived in Kufra. At least the air
circulated when we were moving. In Kufra, we stopped for two hours in 45 degree
[centigrade] weather and we could hardly breathe. The truck was made of metal.
They kept us in there for two hours as punishment because we were shouting
during the journey. God is great; we all survived.

When they let us out of the truck, we were in Kufra Prison.
We spent one week there. They fed us food only once a day. Only rice. Ramadan
was over. I had already experienced two months of hunger in prison. We were now
800 prisoners crowded in different rooms. We slept on pieces of cardboard.
There were no mattresses. It was dirty. The guards had no communication with
us. They just opened and closed the doors.

Kufra is the border place for deportation. They just let
you go from there because there is no place to go. There are always three
nationalities there: Sudanese, Eritreans, and Ethiopians. They cast you back to
your country at Kufra. They don’t actually take you to the border, they
just let you go.

But the smugglers have an agreement with the prison
commander. When they let us go, we are ready for market. The drivers wait for
us outside the Kufra prison and make deals to take us to Tripoli. The drivers
say that they have paid money to get us out of prison. They then take us out of
the city to a place in the open bush.

The drivers told us we had to pay them money since they had
paid to get us released from prison. We had either to pay the 40 dinar bribe to
get us out of prison or $400 to get to Tripoli. The only way to do that is to
call your family to have them send money. My family sent money and I went back
to Tripoli.[182]

[172]
See Human Rights Watch, Service for Life: State Repression and Indefinite
Conscription in Eritrea, April 2009, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/04/16/service-life-0
(accessed September 9, 2009).

[178]
43,000 deported in 2003; 54,000 in 2004; 48,000 in 2005, and 54,000 in 2006.
These statistics are cited as “the official” data in “Escape
from Tripoli: Reports on the Conditions of Migrants in Transit in Libya,”
Fortress Europe, p. 6, citing European Commission report.
According to the report, in 2003, 38 percent of the returnees were Egyptians,
15 percent Nigerians, 12 percent Sudanese, 11 percent Ghanians, and 10 percent
Nigerians. The remaining nationals were Moroccans, Malians, Eritreans and
Somalis, and a small percentage came from Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Far
East. 2004 saw a significant increase in nationals coming from Egypt and
Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly to Nigeria, Niger, Ghana and Mali.

[179]Libyan
government memo to Human Rights Watch, April 18, 2006. See Appendix I, Stemming
the Flow.